As will be appreciated, telephony customers in the United States presently can choose from a number of long distance service providers or carriers each offering various subscription services and rate packages. Moreover, a rate package from even a single service provider can result in different rates for different calls depending on the time of day, customer usage, the identity of the person called and/or other factors, such as promotional offers. As a result, the customer's decision as to which carder to use is a complicated one and will not necessarily result in the lowest cost service for all long distance calls. It is also likely that, in the relatively near future, local service will be provided by a number of competing entities such that the customer will have the same choices in selecting local service that now exist for long distance service. Such open competition will only increase the complexity of selecting service carriers.
In response to this problem, a personal data base maintained on the customer's personal computer for use with the customer's premise equipment such as a telephone or multimedia station has been developed that includes rate information for various long distance providers. The customer can search the data base in an attempt to identify the lowest cost carrier for a particular call. One problem with such a system is that each customer must import and maintain his or her own personal data base. Such a system is expensive and is clearly not feasible for all telephony customers. Moreover, the user must somehow gather rate information and load this information into the data base. Even for those customers who have the capability of establishing such a data base, the continual maintenance and updating of such a system is time consuming and cumbersome because the service providers' rate packages and subscriber plans change frequently.
Therefore, a problem in the art is that there is no simple and cost-effective system for routing any customer to the least expensive service for a particular call.